The new archivist
The new archivist

Author(s): Jana Horáková, Štěpán Miklánek, Pavel Sikora
Subject(s): Visual Arts, Archiving, ICT Information and Communications Technologies, Sociology of Art
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: archivist; curators; art; digital curator;
Summary/Abstract: The curatorial experiment New Archivist (Nový archivář) is a subversive gesture that addresses the current trends in the use of artificial intelligence in the field of art sciences and visual culture. While it is generally accepted that artificial intelligence has been used in recent years to process online databases of cultural heritage as a logical consequence and the ‘next step’ of large projects aimed at digitizing and making accessible the collections of memory institutions (such as Google Art and Culture or Europeana projects), in our project we work with a small dataset containing about 1000 images. While most projects based on the automatic classification of large datasets are framed by the endeavour to create tools for the accurate study of art and cultural history (Digital Curator, Vasulka Live Archive), our project was devoted to a subjective and artistic reflection on the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, without the ambition to generate outputs with the general validity of a sociological probe. We emphasized the personal testimonies of the artists involved and experimented with ways of mediating these accounts through different interfaces and media, with a high degree of added value in the form of a personal interpretation of the collected digital traces of artistic existence.

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